A bot named Winnie

Roddy Peters, group head of digital, started to look at how AI could best be used to support staff across all four college sites. What they came up with was Winnie, a chatbot named for Windsor Forest.

The digital team was aware that there were already numerous AI options available. Most of these were prohibitively expensive, which essentially created a two-tier system if only a limited number of licences were available. Roddy said:

“The question then was how we would decide who has access. Do we just give it to our heads of department? Do we just give it to a handful of digital champions? That felt unfair. We wanted it for our teaching and our admin staff, we wanted AI to be democratised and available to all. We wanted something that was our own to play with, and that's where Winnie came about.”

“We're lucky that we've got some really good links in the aviation industry because we're near Heathrow; at one mentor meeting with the CIO of a major airline he said, ‘if you're not using AI, what are you doing?’ That push set us on the path to try and look at how we could really harness it.”

They say it takes a village - Winnie was the brainchild of Daniel Fairbairn, group executive director, but could only have come about with CEO Gillian May’s enthusiastic support, and the technical know-how of group head of IT Tim Mace and IT infrastructure manager Paul Everett.

As early adopters, the Windsor Forest team had to seek approval from Microsoft for early access to the tools and resources needed to bring Winnie to life. Cautiously trailblazing with a focus on privacy and security, and now sharing their insight with other education providers across the UK, the team had to overcome many technical boundaries to launch in October 2023.

Essentially a chatbot, Winnie has the added advantage of safety parameters such as abuse monitoring, content filtering, and the ability to check the colleges’ file storage which means the information is tailored and accurate.

A silent launch

Winnie initially launched to a room of curious teachers whose ears pricked at the time-saving capabilities it offered. The link had been on the intranet for a couple of months already, but now was the time to scale-up that pilot. Staff were not yet sure what AI could do for them but with some reassurance, guidance, and a cheat sheet from Roddy, they soon dived in. Roddy said:

“It was really refreshing to be saying, ‘Hi, good news from IT! This is going to save you time -Accenture reckon as much as 40%. Writing reports, making quizzes, customising and differentiating lessons: it’s a game-changer. We even see Winnie as a way to interact with our organisation - if you need to call in sick, you can ask what time you have to let your line manager know: Winnie checks our policies, and comes straight back with an answer.”

Winnie is already being used by teaching staff for lesson planning. This has been embraced even by those teachers who were unsure about AI to begin with, including one who wanted to improve her lesson plans but wasn’t quite sure how. Winnie suggested changes that helped her to refresh her plans and made her feel confident in them again. Roddy said:

“We want our students to be as well-equipped as possible, and as digital skills lead, I'm really passionate about upskilling staff because that in turn reaches our students. If the teaching staff can use it, they’ll be confident troubleshooting with students. To be truthful, adoption has been varied but people only have to watch a demo once and their jaws drop. We really enjoy seeing it opening people's eyes to what it can do.”

Different uses

Roddy also shared how it’s being used in different ways across the teaching staff. One ESOL lecturer has been modelling Winnie comprehensively in class with her students and is using it as a language coach, while another class has a live Google doc to track and rate the prompts they've tried.

An English A-level teacher asked Winnie to write a poem in the style of Sylvia Plath. They then asked the students to analyse it, to point out how they knew it wasn’t actually a Sylvia Plath poem and discuss how the style and themes proved it.

Winnie can also help to identify potential student issues. A teacher can look at a student record and ask Winnie to summarise their individual learning plan (ILP). Viewing attendance scores and student management levels allows them to check if any behavioural concerns have been flagged. The college group has seen great results from test data and plans to use enrolment and induction this year to notify and get privacy consent from parents to use active student records.

“We put one of our test student profiles into Winnie and it came up as at risk. When we asked why, it said the student was always missing on Wednesday mornings. Because we log our attendance as a numerical date rather than a word date that could easily have been missed. Something as simple as Winnie flagging an issue with an attendance pattern would allow us to open up that conversation. Is it a bursary issue because they're waiting for an off-peak train? Are they a young carer and we weren’t aware of that?”

Windsor Forest’s AI journey so far has seen the digital team going into local schools, working with other FE providers, hosting demos, and speaking at events. The college group will also hold its own AI conference later this year, which Jisc’s AI team is supporting.

Jisc has supported Roddy and the team with their AI work throughout the process of setting up and rolling out Winnie, particularly in helping them to connect with others across the sector who were also working on innovative AI projects.

Roddy summed up the benefits of AI:

“It isn't going to steal our jobs; we know that humans are our greatest resource, but people working with machines will give better results than people working on their own. Think how much time we all cumulatively spend copying and pasting. AI is going to revolutionise our workflow so people can get back to what they do best: helping students. Surely that's a win for everyone.”

Further information

Read advice and guidance from Jisc’s AI team.